This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Dumb and dumber Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

I've got a few search feeds set up in BottomFeeder, and every so often it leads me to a real gem. Consider this bit of silliness, for example:

Second, he introduces us to a cool reflection tool called Lutz Roeder 19s .NET Reflector. However, he goes and says, 1CThe .NET Framework introduced the world to the concept of reflection which can be used to examine any .NET-based code, whether it is a single class or an entire assembly. 1D Are you joking? Java has had the Reflection API for years. They were the innovators there.

It gets better:

James also talks about the .NET build tool called NAnt and the .NET based unit testing tool called NUnit and doesn 19t even mention the original Java-based projects these bad boys were based off, namely Ant and JUnit respectively. Quite expectedly, he does mention Microsoft 19s upcoming MSBuild technology (which competes on a feature basis with NAnt) which will ship with Visual Studio .NET 2005.

I hardly know where to begin with this utter lack of knowledge. I suppose I could point to this paper on reflection in Smalltalk-80 - note the 1989 date on the paper. The Java guys were the "real innovators" here, eh? I think not. And JUnit was the "original" unit testing framework? You might have a look here - page down until you see the SUnit link, and read the description. These guys remind me of some of the people I went to college with - for them, if it was north of Manhattan, it simply didn't exist (or at least, it shouldn't have :) ). An awful lot of the Java community wears the same brand of blinders, and seems to believe that everything in computer science - and in OO in particular - was invented by Sun and Gosling. Sheesh.